How long does an ext4 format take?

Posted by Bill O'Dwyer on Ask Ubuntu See other posts from Ask Ubuntu or by Bill O'Dwyer
Published on 2012-06-09T03:13:44Z Indexed on 2012/06/09 4:46 UTC
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external-hdd

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gparted

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ext4

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format

The USB cable on my Iomega Prestige 1TB hard drive conked out a while back, and I've finally managed to get a new one. I removed the old NTFS file system because I use Windows maybe once a month, and then only for Windows-only activities.
So I plug in the HDD to my laptop, and get it to start converting to ext4. Gparted is currently on the "create new ext4 file system" and has been for about 2 hours.
Is this right? I know 1TB is fairly large, but the last time I did this, I'm pretty sure it was a fast(er) job.
Can anybody shed some light on what's going on here?

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